Blockchain could save investment banks up to $12B a year: Accenture

>Eventually there will be self-driving cars, and there's no special reason to think that Uber will be the best at building them, or that its dominant position in the ride-hailing-app space will protect it from better self-driving-car businesses.

With a blockchain, the database and the revision history would be part of the same artifact. Not sure how advantageous this is, however.

Cryptocurrency is the future but I've never talked to more snake oil sales people than when talking to "blockchain" companies. I marvel at people's ability to sell nothingness

I believe this is the timeless state of all big Blockchain projects: ready one year from now.

I specifically asked for success stories because I know everyone is throwing money after blockchain stuff. So I don't doubt that there are tons of planned projects. However, I haven't yet heard of blockchain technology being applied to solve an actual problem, except Bitcoin.

CME Group and the UK Royal Mint are planning to launch a blockchain-based product [1] -- also in 2017. But according to the article, it seems to be a simple digital promissory note, with the bearer owning the right to a certain amount of gold. Since we already have a central creditor, upon which the entire system depends (the Royal Mint), there is zero reason to use a distributed database to store anything.

Just put the database in the same safe as the gold.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-gold-blockchain-royal-mint...

So you might have as well said "Signal".

My point was precisely that you cannot, as far as I can see, separate blockchain technology from Bitcoin. My argument is that it's not blockchain technology that's useful, but rather a blockchain, in itself, that's useful. And it's useful because it's a distributed, proof-of-work timestamp server.

The value of Bitcoin comes not from the technology it uses, but from its incentive structure. An increase in the value of bitcoins feeds back into the system, resulting in an increase in security (hash rate) by way of an increase in the profitability of mining. Since Bitcoin's value comes from its time-stamping ability, and since this time-stamping is done using proof-of-work, it makes sense for an increase in the hash rate to also cause an increase in value, at least up to a certain point (provided no changes to the protocol are made to take advantage of the enormous hash rate of the current network).

It's always marketing speak, with reference to all the wonderful properties of "blockchain technology", and diagrams like [1], which could have simply been summed up in three words: "no payment intermediary". Although... doesn't that diagram look like they just changed the intermediary's name from "Payment Intermediaries" to "BCSIS Blockchain platform", plus added some cool-looking server icons?

But the source code will almost certainly never see the light of day, so we will never really know how they use blockchain technology. At the end of the day, I think it's a lot more likely that this bank's software provider created a new solution and just said it has "blockchain technology" because it's a vague buzzword, and then the bank released a press release based on this, again because of the buzzword effect.

[1] http://www.straitstimes.com/sites/default/files/blockchain.p...

Database companies price their products by how much they think they can extract from your business. That's why they're mostly priced at free or some nominal cost for the first few years, and then several million dollars per year afterwards.

Blockchains, in theory, could also serve as a voting mechanism on splits, which could be manifested as blockchain hardforks. As Satoshi Nakamoto wrote:

> The proof-of-work also solves the problem of determining representation in majority decision making. If the majority were based on one-IP-address-one-vote, it could be subverted by anyone able to allocate many IPs. Proof-of-work is essentially one-CPU-one-vote. The majority decision is represented by the longest chain, which has the greatest proof-of-work effort invested in it.

Essentially a blockchain can codify the ownership of a stock share into a smart contract.

That's the theory, and only insofar as it applies to a Proof of Work blockchain like Bitcoin.

A private blockchain is more likely to be a Proof of Stake blockchain, in which shares (or tokens of other sorts) are issued in a "premine" which creates all of the tokens that will ever exist. These are then distributed to the initial group of trusted members of the private blockchain. From there, the blockchain can eliminate the need for a trusted authority to serve as the system of record of ownership.